Bell Labs first demonstrated a working, practical silicon solar cell on April 25, 1954.
This is the moment universally recognized as the birth of modern solar power.
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Data Point One: China produces 80% of the world's solar panels, 60% of its wind turbines, 75% of its lithium-ion batteries and leads the world in energy innovations like five-minute charge stations and replaceable batteries.
Data Point Two: Scotland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway are all actively building a shared North Sea clean‑energy system based on massive offshore wind, hydrogen production, and cross‑border pipelines. This region is positioning itself to become a post‑fossil energy superpower.
The North Sea is being reconceived as a giant, multinational power plant. Countries around it are coordinating offshore wind farms, subsea cables, and hydrogen pipelines to create a shared clean‑energy basin.
This includes:
Scotland — enormous offshore wind potential, aiming to export green hydrogen.
Germany — huge industrial demand, planning to import hydrogen at scale.
Denmark — building “energy islands” to centralize wind power and hydrogen production.
Netherlands, Belgium, Norway — integrating into a shared grid and pipeline network.
This is not speculation.
It’s already underway.
Data Point Three: donnie wants to make America the dominant coal and oil-based economy in the world. (Sounds like Strike Three to me).
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Abandoning "Data Points" and adopting "straws in the wind" as the organizing scaffold:
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and even Egypt and Jordan are all planning or already building gigantic solar fields across their deserts, on a scale that would have sounded like science fiction twenty years ago.
The logic is straightforward and powerful.
Unmatched solar irradiance — some of the highest on Earth.
Vast, uninhabited land suitable for utility-scale arrays.
A strategic pivot away from oil toward exportable clean energy (especially hydrogen).
Cheapest solar electricity in the world — record-low bids have come from the Gulf.
Saudi Arabia’s NEOM project alone includes plans for:
Gigawatt-scale solar
Gigawatt-scale green hydrogen
Export infrastructure
Sounds as if the Gulf Guys are coming at the same opportunity as the North Sea Guys - use a pollution free energy source, the sea, the sun - produce limitless electricity and get a pollution free by-product, hydrogen, in the bargain. And they are going to do all that by purchasing vast quantities of Chinese solar panels.
In the United States, on the other hand, they are erecting a giant eighteen carat gold statue of donnie astride a giant eighteen carat gold oil barrel, kinda rough rider-like, in downtown Midland to mark America's leap into the dark ages.
When the rest of the world's people are all driving BYD EVs from China in a couple of years, fueled by solar and wind produced electricity, produced by Chinese wind turbines or Chinese solar panels, stored in Chinese produced batteries until it is needed in homes and businesses - businesses like convenience store/charging stations selling food and sundries and five-minute charges provided by Chinese technology or pop-in/pop-out replaceable batteries from China, or businesses like Steelmaking, Cement production, Chemical manufacturing, or Refineries, all using hydrogen produced by that electricity - America is will be on the cusp of aggressively re-entering the Nineteenth Century.
And most of the machinery that gets used in those hydrogen driven industrial businesses will be made in the World's Workshop - China.
China has built the industrial base for the post‑fossil world.
And China didn’t just get ahead in a few industries.
It repositioned the entire material base of the 21st century while much of the world was still arguing about the 20th.
They now dominate, solar manufacturing, battery manufacturing, EV manufacturing, wind turbine manufacturing, electrolyzer manufacturing, grid hardware, rare‑earth refining, industrial robotics, high‑speed rail and port logistics.
That’s not a lead.
That’s checkmate.
And I hear that that statue in Midland is already turning green.
I didn't know that gold did that.
Some republican said recently that all that glitters really is gold.
And Seventy-Seven Million Idiots think so.
And while engulfed in the joy of that glitter those idiots have all moved on to really important stuff like trans athletes as a structural threat to our way of life.
China someday will no doubt get slower and stupider - dominant cultures always do - but when it happens it will be way too late for the United States to take advantage.
